The popular NSF-funded Earth & Sky radio series — “illuminating pathways to a vibrant and sustainable future for over six million people daily” — has been focusing on nanotech for quite a while now (see list). Most recently is an interview (description and download) looking at the question of nanotechnology-based sensors and privacy:

As technology advances, even if we didn’t have nanotechnology per se, we would still be having more and more advanced ways to record information, to detect information, about individuals. And we as a society need to think about how we want these collections of information to be handled…

One can imagine perhaps — I’m speculating — that eventually federal education funding might be dependent on the deployment of these sensors in the classroom. So, if there’s any students present who perhaps have been indulging [in illegal drugs] the night before, alarms would ring, class would come to a halt, and those students might get in trouble.